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As I've been saying here interminably the move of manufacturing back to the US just isn't going to lead to any great expansion in the labour force used in manufacturing in the US. Modern manufacturing just doesn't produce that many jobs. And this latest move by Apple to bring back part of the Mac manufacturing is predicted to produce 200 jobs. Yes, that's right, 200, not even 2,000 and certainly not any number that's even going to register on the national dial:

Cook, who took over from Steve Jobs last year, said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that Apple will work with partners on the project and put in at least $100 million of its own money. Outside involvement may increase the total.

The investment “sounds like a 200-job operation with about a million-unit output,” said Dan Luria, a labor economist at Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center in Plymouth, Michigan, who studies factory operations. Apple will probably rely on tax breaks and other incentives for the facility, he said.

Half a million in investment needed to create one manufacturing job, eh? And this isn't one random guess at the number of jobs either:

Hewlett-Packard Co. works with Foxconn to manufacture personal computers in Indianapolis for U.S. markets. The facility employs 1,300 workers and will build 2.9 million PCs this year, said Tony Prophet, senior vice president for Hewlett- Packard’s printing and personal systems.

That's just the sort of amount of labour that's needed to do these tasks. For of course US workers aren't going to do it all by hand, as the Chinese factories do it. No, it's all by machine with the minimum of actual human intervention.

While Apple’s commitment could set a precedent for electronics suppliers, it probably doesn’t presage a large or rapid shift of production back to the U.S., said Michael Marks, the former CEO of Flextronics International Ltd., which was the largest contract manufacturer in the world before the rise of Foxconn. He also estimates $100 million may create about 200 jobs.

Mechanised manufacturing just doesn't produce many jobs.

Oh, and just a fun little calculation. It takes $100 million to create 200 jobs, that's half a million per job. And we've 7.7% of the 150 million of the US labour force out of work. We usually think that about 3 percentage points of that is "excess" unemployment, somewhere between 4 and 5% being the natural rate of unemployment. So, it'll cost $2.2 trillion or thereabouts in investment to create those 4.5 million jobs.

Boy oh boy, isn't this a great time to be increasing the taxes on the returns to investment. You know, the capital gains and dividends which are the things that encourage people to risk their money by investing?